Chasing the Sun
by electricsymphony
Summary: It's been 35 years since Katherine paid the ultimate price of her life to conquer the man that enslaved her in terror for five centuries, and everyone finds a way to live on, coming to find that freedom isn't anything like it's chalked up to be. Damon's still asleep in relentless dreams of their last moments together, but he's about to get one hell of a rude awakening. AU post 3x5.


**Notes: **I had a dream about going to University in Amsterdam. Then this happened. Damon and Katherine weren't actually in it, but in the end, those two can really squeeze their way into just about anything when it comes to me. I have no other better excuses for this weird new story than that. I claim nothing in this mess but my own madness.

This was originally going to be a one-shot, but in writing the beginnings of it, I fell in love with the endless possibilities of this universe and I didn't want it to be a one-shot deal. I couldn't let the endless ideas I have go to waste, there's too much potential here to waste. Other characters besides Damon & Katherine will come into play in following chapters. Eventual side-ships/stories will focus on Elejah, Jer/Bekah & a complicated Stefan/Caroline/Tyler threesome-thingy. For now, just sit back and enjoy some introductory D/K.

* * *

_It's all a jumbled mess of deafening battle cries, screams of agony and a scorching, roaring circle of fire, and Damon can't see a goddamn thing through the thick smog of smoking embers surrounding them. It's all over in a second, the most meticulously detailed surprise scheme in recorded history, he knows with certainty. He would never expect anything less from Katherine Pierce. _

_When she raises her head from the stake plunged in the hybrid bastard's heart to look at him across the field, he notes that her usually saccharine, sultry smile has been replaced by one of profound relief, and the aching bones in his shoulders sink down to his knees as he returns it. Her eyes are pale, bereft of their usual mischievous gleam, and her skin is rapidly greying. He tries his best not to scowl in displeasure, not to let his vulnerability show—tries his best to maintain the charade of impassivity, but he knows the poignant weight of this moment better than anyone. Katherine's entire life began with the corpse lying still underneath her, and it's only apropos that her life end with him as well. As their eyes lock and hold, they say a thousand years worth of endearments, proclamations and promises to each other as lovers are wont to do in the dark of night, all in the three seconds it takes for Damon's guard to be lowered._

_He barely even registers Rebekah's indignant cry of despair before she plunges a knife into the back of the already decaying doppelganger. Katherine doesn't even turn to face Rebekah, instead falling on top of the man she (successfully) vowed to destroy, and after five-hundred years of bitter solitude, finally finding freedom in death._

* * *

He has dreams of that same face every night. At times, the facial expressions will seem more like Elena, but he knows intuitively that he isn't dreaming of the (_living dead_) doppelganger. No, he's dreaming of a face that's been dead and buried for almost thirty-five years now. He knows they are dreams and not memories because in these brief glimpses of a blissful fantasy, she's holding his hand, teasing him through thick, coy lashes that radiate warmth down to the deepest pits of his blackened heart as they travel together through the narrow, cobblestone alleyways of Amsterdam. But no—his gaze travels down to his hands where he can feel the electric touch of her palm, slick and tight within his own and sees only thin air. He looks up abruptly to the shouts of irritation in front of him only to be faced with a group of beet red-faced tourists flanking him on all sides rapidly conversing in a language that isn't Dutch or English, so he pays no mind to trying to decipher it.

Across the Herengracht is the one sight he'll never tire of seeing, and his lips turn upwards in satisfaction. His _home. _In the late 1950s, after killing Joseph and escaping from his brother's self-righteous wrath, he'd traveled from Mystic Falls to Amsterdam for the first time and bought a tight, rustic little corner of real estate and made a home there for the better part of a decade. He tried-_Lord knows he tried-_to make a home out of Boarding House in Mystic Falls, but when everyone dispersed and fled after Klaus' demise, he knew there was nothing holding him to the building that marked a chapter of his life haunted only by the dark ghosts of his own regret.

And after Elena's departure to Europe two months after Klaus' death, when a hesitant, tired and profoundly weary Stefan had announced that he was taking Caroline up on her offer of moving to Marseilles, Damon had dismissed the half-hearted gesture to tag along and instead went alone to the only place he could think of—_home._

He can so easily imagine the playfully distasteful curve of her lips as she declares what he views as charming and rustic as actually just dark and dingy. In fact, he can hear her angelic laugh beside him as he turns every lock in the old, faded oak door and pushes forward into the cramped entryway. They say the first thing you forget about someone is their voice—he disagrees, as he hears it on repetitive loop after loop in his mind day in and day out. (Or perhaps, even after thirty-five years, his mind simply can't comprehend the need to begin remembering to forget.)

* * *

_Her lips are sweet and sour like only the finest Merlot, her hair draped over his neck, tickling his sensitive skin as she smiles into his mouth, her fangs as sharp as a blade, nibbling at his lips, demanding entrance as if it's her natural birth right, drawing blood and lapping at it ravenously. Her skin glistens with slick, hot perspiration, a few dark curls of hair matted to her forehead in sweat, her body bare save for a pair of lace panties curled around her left ankle that never quite got discarded in their passionate haste._

"_I'm dying tomorrow," she proclaims with a wry grin and an almost childlike enthusiasm as her body writhes under his own, and he slows his rhythm for a moment to peer down at her in curious inquisition._

"_As someone who has been running from death for five centuries, I'd think you'd feel a little less ecstatic at the prospect," he breathes out in a distracted pant as her hips cant and roll up against his erection._

"_As someone who has been chasing this rat bastard to his grave for half a millennium, I'd say you should be impressed that I'm showing as much restraint as I am," she asserts back as she thrusts her hips up to meet his rhythm, making him bite his lip and plunge into her harder._

"_This sure as hell doesn't feel like restraint," he grits out through a clash of tangled teeth and strangled, caught breaths._

_She laughs, low and gravelly, and pulls at the nape of his neck to kiss him square on the lips. "My sweet Damon, when have I ever exercised restraint when it comes to you?"_

_He wants to say 'Always'. He doesn't say anything._

"_I'm itching to get my hand on that dagger; I want to kill him right now, right this moment, and fuck you over his corpse in celebration."_

_He wants to say, 'There will be no celebration. You'll be dead. That's nothing to celebrate.' He doesn't say a damn thing._

_Instead, he savors the bittersweet pain of her bruising kisses and moves his mouth down her jawline as she closes her eyes in pleasure and arches her back with each of his feather-light touches. He bites her neck with his blunt human teeth and whispers hot air against the sensitive tissue of her ear, "Not to worry, Annie darling, the sun will come up tomorrow," he teases sardonically._

_She throws her head back in a captivating laugh, kissing his neck in appreciation of his humor. Her voice is low, dark and full of malicious intent when she asserts passionately, "And it'll set with his corpse decaying into the dead, green earth."_

_He doesn't say 'And so will yours.' He doesn't say 'Please don't die.' He thinks he might utter the faintest whisper of "I love you" though, because he feels his mouth moving and he can feel her muscles tense in his arms._

"_I'm dying tomorrow," she reiterates again, but it's sober now, with the slightest flicker of fear, but it's still so sharp with conviction that it's a knife to his already wounded heart. Katherine never repeats herself. She's not reiterating this fact because he didn't hear it the first time; no, she's reminding Damon that it's an inescapable, forgone conclusion. Perhaps she's reminding herself of this too. He needs to hear it; they both need to hear it._

_He doesn't say 'I'll mourn you', because it's a lie. He would never do Katherine Pierce the dishonor of pitying her posthumously—she's the last person who would ever want that._

* * *

Five-thirty in the morning is his favorite hour of the day. The sun rises and blooms before his very eyes every morning on his route to UvA, and it relaxes all the aching, tired bones in his body, heals them with its own unique burst of sunlight, replenishes his mind with a thrust into reality and a white-wash over the terror and anguish of his dreams. It's a simple thing, nature, but nonetheless astonishingly beautiful—there's something fascinating in simplicity. You simply don't get these kind of picturesque views in Mystic Falls. They don't exist.

He barrels and maneuvers his way into the disheveled mess that is his office and kicks a few unopened boxes out of the way to get inside. He's never allowed his students to come back here; it's always been reserved for _one_ person. And she lives on still, in his heart, in his eyes, in his ears and in the sketches hanging from line wire across every square inch of the space.

The beginning of his morning is fairly ordinary—at 7, he eats breakfast with Colin, his teaching assistant on the stunning terrace overlooking the city below outside the department lounge. At 8, he goes over his lesson, but he ends up skimming the words after approximately five minutes, as always, since he already knows it so well. He rarely goes by the book, anyway—he's considered one of the best Literature professors at the University because his lectures haven't been prepared the night before, they've been prepared, cultivated and memorized _centuries_ in advance.

At 9, Elena calls from Elijah's fancy jet somewhere far above the Himalayan Mountains in Nepal to wish him a 'Happy Birthday'. He grits his teeth and reminds himself that she doesn't know the extensive history behind his distaste for birthdays and is pleasant in return. He finds it ironically apropos that Elena wandered off alone to trek the world in hopes of finding herself and ended up six years later as a permanent appendage of the eldest known vampire on the planet. Somehow, he knows, _only Elena._

At least _Elijah's_ doppelgänger is alive and lives a legacy beyond stolen picture sketches that he keeps locked away in his office like a shrine to Katherine's long-lost life.

He wants to be happy for them. He _is _happy for them, in his better moments.

This isn't one of those better moments.

At 10, his Comparative Literature course begins—the first of the semester—and he's already put Elena's phone call behind him, has shared a few shots of preemptive whiskey with Colin to take the edge off this morning and is as ready as ever to meet a new, fresh-faced group of students eager to learn under his tutelage.

And at 10:04 A.M. on August 26th, 2047, he looks up from his podium and addresses the auditorium brimming with new faces and his breath gets caught in his throat when he sees one that isn't quite so new after all. Faster than his brain can catch up, his head is spinning, his eyesight is blurry and if there was any question of whether vampires were immune to fainting, there wasn't now. He feels himself hit the cold, harsh ground before his mind goes blank.

The last thing he can recall before he passes out is Colin's shouts of surprise and the intense, panicked look on her heart-shaped face as she rushes out of her seat and down to the podium, ignoring the incredulous looks of the other students as she sprints down the stairs at an almost inhuman speed.

* * *

_He never mourns her, because if he keeps her alive in his mind, she'll never really have to die. She'll live on, always, in his heart, in his mouth, in his touch—he never let go of her hand, not for a second, because if he does, he'll break his promise. He won't mourn her. He __**can't**__. That would be admitting there was something to mourn. Elijah is off in the distance, holding a sobbing and hysterical Rebekah and Damon is just staring down at the limp form that was the only love of his life.  
_

_A hand reaches out towards him and he takes it without knowing whom he's grasping onto. He's pulled up to standing height and his brother gives him a small nod, pats him on the back and steers him away._

_Damon doesn't shed a tear for her._

_She's never shed a tear for him, and he only figures it's only fair to give her equal courtesy._

* * *

He wakes up in an abrupt lurch, startled to see that he isn't in a hospital, but lying face-up on his desk in his cramped office, and she's standing there, so effortless and perfect, as if she belongs there, painted into the landscape of a portrait he painted out of fragments of portraits _she_ painted. She's standing, impossibly alive, with her hands on her hips and a quirk in her lips, holding a sketch—_the _sketch, the first one he ever took of hers, a portrait of mother and daughter, his favorite. She's holding his favorite portrait, staring at it and back at him as though she can't seem to find the words to express her awe.

"How do you have this, Damon?" And just the sound of her voice outside the recesses of his own mind makes his whole world tilt on its axis. She gestures towards _all _the sketches now, littering the whole room from floor to ceiling, pinned on every usable surface. "All of this," she breathes in astonishment; "Where did you get these? It's fucking impossible."

Damon tries to bark out a laugh, but it comes out as a sore cough as he tries to sit up and regain his upright footing. "You want to talk _impossible?"_ He gestures up and down her body as he walks towards her and she frowns in reply. "The only way _this _isn't impossible is if it were a dream, and my dreams are never this confusing."

She glares at him in resolute contention. "I asked you a question."

"So did I," he refutes, backing her up into a corner, their hot breaths mingling in the tight space, her back up against a filing cabinet.

"I asked first," her voice was low, but steady.

He throws his hands up at the absurd logic—he stole a few sketches from her a couple hundred years ago, and she's _standing in front of him when she's supposed to be dead. _One certainly trumps the other for importance, he thinks.

"It's a long story," he finally relents. "Now, no bullshit—_how are you alive_?"

Her angelic laugh sends shivers down his spine, and her hot breath in his ear perks every nerve ending he has alive with a revitalized fire that he thought had died when she did. Her smile is quick, tight, but with that patented ease of superior confidence that makes the borrowed blood in his body pound painfully behind his ears in hot, terrifying familiarity, "Trust me, Damon, mine's _much_ longer."

* * *

**Notes: **I don't really know what this story is yet, but I realized I was too much in love with the possibilities this universe represents to let it go as a one-shot. It's too interesting for that. So... what did you think? I know it's more than a bit strange, but I kind of like it. As always, any comments, constructive criticisms and suggestions are always the best help.

Thanks for reading, and please do let me know if you think this is worth experimenting with further. :)


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